


A Figure in Black

by Hormonal_Trashbag



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, POV Leia Organa, Reylo Short Story Collection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 05:12:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10655619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hormonal_Trashbag/pseuds/Hormonal_Trashbag
Summary: Leia had lost much of her hope, after feeling the death of Han at their son’s hand. She did not trust him to not attempt something similar with her; killing his father had not had its intended effect, perhaps slaying his mother would.Ben was not there for her, however. Her abilities with the force were limited, and she supposed that to be her fault as she had never taken the time to properly hone them, but Leia could sense where he was headed, and this knowledge was cause for further alarm.Rey.





	A Figure in Black

**Author's Note:**

> I waited so long to post this...sorry!

It was late. By all counts, Leia should have turned in for the night several hours ago, but distressing news of the ever-active First Order had her up in the dark of early morning, preparing for a briefing she was to give after daybreak. The demands of her duty seemed so much heavier at night, when a tired woman should be allowed rest.

Leia had known no rest since the day she marched into that New Republic hangar to recruit the first X-Wing pilots that would become the Resistance. That had been seven--no, eight--years back, but she still couldn’t shake the young, bright faces from her head, many of them long perished. She had recruited children to fight in a war that had begun in the era of her parents, a failed attempt to pass on the baton. She was still there, and she was still fighting.

Her weariness did nothing to dull her senses. Her son was as familiar to her now as he had been in her womb, and she felt his presence on base, amongst the Resistance. She ignored the shaking of her hands as she reached for a blaster, forcing down the panic that he would use against her.

Leia had lost much of her hope, after feeling the death of Han at their son’s hand. She did not trust him to not attempt something similar with her; killing his father had not had its intended effect, perhaps slaying his mother _would_.

Ben was not there for her, however. Her abilities with the force were limited, and she supposed that to be her fault as she had never taken the time to properly hone them, but Leia could sense where he was headed, and this knowledge was cause for further alarm.

_Rey_.

The girl that had come to her, _to the Resistance,_ from the clutches of her son to fight against him in a galaxy-wide war as a force-user in training.

Leia broke into a run, graying hair trailing behind her like a loosened shroud.

There was no time to question how he had known where the Resistance base was, or how he had snuck his way in so easily, no time to do anything but pump her legs as fast as they would go and ignore the creaking of joints that had not been so noticeable even five years prior. The corridors were empty and darkened, everyone else safely tucked into their bunks and unaware of the security breach, a skeleton crew active little more than an easily avoided irritant to her son.

Ben reached the infirmary long before she could.

The figure looming in the stark, sterile infirmary room was unrecognizable to her, yet she knew it was Ben swaddled in those strangling, black robes, leaning over the sleeping woman like Death himself. His head turned sharply and under his hood was a mask, a dark vacuum where his warm, brown eyes should be, a feral, black snout covering the pink lips that had been so prone to pouting in his childhood.

Leia raised her blaster, set to stun, and aimed it at his chest.

He appraised her in silence, head tilted thoughtfully. She stared at his large, gloved hands, one intertwined in Rey’s glossy hair in a mockery of affection, the other enclosing the small distention of her belly with the width of his palm.

“You shouldn’t aim a blaster at someone if you have no intention of shooting, General Organa,” he chided, whatever softness to his tone distorted through his mask, a pale imitation of Darth Vader’s visage and voice. However much her son idealized the sith lord, he did not induce the same fears that had haunted her since the destruction of Alderaan.

He raised his hand from the swell of Rey’s abdomen, ripping her blaster from her fingers and through the air to his waiting, open palm. Ben set the blaster onto the bed, then returned his gaze to Rey.

“What do you want with her?” Leia asked, an unsaid threat hanging between them.

There was no doubt that Ben could slaughter her with ease, but Leia would gladly die if it meant protecting Rey from her son. The protectiveness that bloomed between her breasts were inexplicable, but she sensed Rey’s importance, and something else...something she couldn’t quite place.

Her son decided to speak frankly. “To know how far along she is, and why she is in an infirmary.”

Leia eyed him curiously.

Rey had not been forthcoming about her pregnancy. She had hidden it under ill-fitted clothing and excuses of poor sleep and a fictitious stomach bug. Even now, Rey could have continued to hide it, had she not collapsed and been rushed to Doctor Kalonia.

“Take off that mask,” she replied instead. “Speak to me like another human being, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” he hissed. “You will tell me what I need to know, or I will take the information directly from the source, which, I assure you, will be infinitely less pleasant. The choice is yours.”

Grief itched in her throat and burned her eyes. The boy she had given birth to was so changed that she hardly knew what to do with the cold, cruel creature that now stood before her.

“I am your mother,” she told him.

He snarled back, “I have no mother.”

What had Snoke done to him that he could say such a thing? That he could slash through his father and torment her now? Perhaps Han had been right--there _was_ too much of Vader in him. She swallowed around the lump in her throat. Her son truly was lost to her, had turned his back on everything she had raised him to be, and yet she couldn’t hate him.

“What do you intend to do to her?”

His head snapped towards her dangerously.

_“Do_ to her?” he repeated, easily riled. “Just whose child do you think she is carrying? That ignorant traitor’s? Some foolish pilot’s? As if anyone else is worthy of touching her.”

Once more, a Skywalker child was to be brought into a galaxy of strife and conflict. Leia looked towards Rey’s resting face, freckled and now slightly rounded by the pregnancy, struggling to breathe. Her son had done this to Rey. _Her son._ The poor girl must have been mortified, too ashamed to admit what had happened to her.

She closed her eyes and remembered the look on Rey’s face when she was told she should abort, the absolute shock and confusion that had twisted her features.

“Why would you do such a thing to her?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.

His fury clogged the room as he stepped away from Rey and turned towards her fully, his imposing figure towering over her as he straightened his back.

“I didn’t force myself on Rey,” he seethed. “She welcomed me.”

Leia said nothing.

“When Luke refused to pass on his _wise_ teachings, I was the one to reach out and offer guidance and understanding. I listened to her when no one else recognized her isolation. She simpered and smiled for you all, but I alone knew her loneliness. I allowed her to grow without restriction when she doubted the narrow perspective of the Jedi. I never tried to change her or turn her into a weapon, as I’m sure you intended.”

“She’s been training on and off with Luke for months now. Don’t lie to me.”

“Has she?” Ben sneered. “In all the time since you’ve found him and been in communication, has he once mentioned Rey?”

“She left the base--”

He interrupted. “To be with me.”

It couldn’t be true. Leia refused to believe it was possible that Rey, so adamant at first in her hatred of Kylo Ren, could be swayed to his side. Yet…

Somehow, she sensed her son wasn’t lying. He never had been a liar.

“Enough of this,” he stated, patience wearing thin, “tell me what I need to know.”

Leia sighed, wearied by news that should have brought her joy, had her son become a different man.

“She’s very early into her second trimester, probably somewhere around thirteen weeks,” she said at length, and his shoulders eased fractionally. “Doctor Kalonia is concerned that carrying the child to term might put too much strain on her.”

“Why?” His voice cracked, the sound more pronounced through his apparatus.

Leia smiled sadly to her son, more human now than at any point in the past few minutes. For a moment, he was just a helpless man, a fearful expectant father.

“Her body isn’t prepared for a pregnancy. She grew up in a volatile environment, malnourished and without a regular cycle; it’s a miracle she conceived at all. She collapsed a few days ago from exhaustion.”

“Is the Resistance not feeding her?” he snapped. “Is that why she’s still so tiny?”

Rey stirred and they both stilled, watching as she slowly blinked. She did not notice Leia’s presence at the end of her bed, her head instantly turning to Ben, the overwhelming source of energy in the room, a bleary smile spreading over her face.

“What are you doing here? Looking for trouble?”

Rey’s tone was teasing and damning all at once. There was no horror in the young woman’s eyes at seeing the cloaked master of the Knights of Ren at her bedside, she was pleased. Leia never had seen Rey look so at ease in the entire span of their knowing each other.

Without a second thought, Ben threw back the hood of his cloak and reached over the curve of his helm to the back of his head, unlatching it. It released with a hiss and he roughly pulled it from his skull, black curls flowing out and settling around his head and shoulders. While he had refused to unmask for his mother, for Rey, he was willing to bare his face and this knowledge _stung_.

He was not a conventionally handsome man in the way Han had been, but rather a fusion of odd features that made him eerily beautiful. Leia blinked rapidly in a futile attempt to keep her tears back. Crossing the length of his narrow face was a garish, angry scar that he hadn’t bothered to heal properly, not as a wordless declaration to seek revenge, but because of a strange sense of soft sentimentality.

“I was worried,” he confessed to her in a low tone. “You didn’t come to me. I feared the worst.”

Rey started to shift, moving to sit, but he gently held her in place, shaking his head. “Don’t move. You need to rest. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Ben pressed his full lips to her forehead. Leia realized the affection she witnessed was genuine, that her son was being honest--whatever there was between he and Rey, it _was_ mutual. She looked away, unable to see her undeserving son whisper sweet nothings in the young woman’s ear when he had taken away Han.

She heard the wet sounds of a deep kiss, a shaky sigh as Rey breathed, “It’s a boy.”

There was pride in the expectant mother’s tone, the brightness of her smile infecting her voice. For a moment, they were just a young couple and Rey was delivering happy news.

Ben’s voice was frantic as he murmured back, “You need to take better care of yourself. I can’t lose you. I don’t know what I would do--”

His words rankled Leia to her core, spoken as if he hadn’t taken what she held dearest and crushed them under his heavy boots. Ben had been manipulated and groomed and Leia hadn’t protected him from that as she ought to have, but he had more than exacted his revenge for her motherly negligence.

Rey shushed him, her beaming face ripe with affection. “I’ll be fine, once I put on a little more weight. I promise nothing is going to happen to me or the baby.”

Leia couldn’t stand another moment of this bewildering, alternate universe she seemed to have stumbled into. She cleared her throat.

Rey jolted, startled by the realization that she and Ben were far from being alone, and he glared at her, brown eyes sharp and _burning_ with ire. So wrapped up was he with her, some part of him had forgotten about their audience, and Rey’s dread crackled around them as a physical, palpable force.

Leia had trusted Rey--had believed Rey trusted _her,_ though evidently, that belief was unwarranted--and now she could feel little more than dismay at seeing her hackles rise and limbs draw around her middle defensively. Ben crouched closer to Rey, an unexpected mimicry of a hound protecting its mate.

“General--”

Leia raised a hand to silence her. “I’ve already heard enough from my son.”

She wondered in quiet outrage what they thought she would do to her own grandchild. Twisted and dark Kylo Ren might have been, but surely he had to know she could never willingly harm her own flesh and blood, not as he had. Furious as Leia was, how could she place any blame on an innocent child?

After so many years of sustaining her righteous anger against the many wrongs of their galaxy, Leia found it difficult to constantly keep this up. Her wrath left her as swiftly as it had first swelled in her chest, leaving her a hollowed husk, thoroughly shucked of any meaningful, productive emotion.

She was going to be a grandmother, had gained yet another title she wasn’t prepared to bear, perhaps didn’t _deserve_ to bear. A new responsibility had latched its weight to her shoulders, when she’d already been buckling at the knees.

In the happy life that shadowed her reality, she imagined Han slapping Ben’s shoulder in congratulations, bubbling drinks being tossed in the air as toasts were made, her son joyous and open and everything he wasn’t. She envisioned Han with yet another curly-haired infant folded into his arms--he had been so _good_ with Ben as a baby. He would have spoiled their son’s child absolutely rotten, an unspoken apology for his own shortcomings as a father. Reality was a hospital bed and a malnourished mother likely to lose her child or her life, a monstrous man and the sanguine woman he would kill for.

“What are you going to do to me?” Rey finally asked, fear for an unknown future overtaking self-preserving silence. She was a young woman with few other places to go.

“Nothing,” she and her son answered at the same time; him gnashing his teeth at the mere idea of anyone laying a hand on Rey. He shot Leia a look of warning. If something did happen to her, regardless of who was responsible, Ben would raise hell. Leia had no desire to see just what sort of havoc he was capable of unleashing.

He turned to Rey with a pained plea. “You should come with me. I can keep you safe.”

Rey sunk into her pillows with a smile of uncertainty, her hand reaching to clasp his. “You could stay here,” she countered.

They were both set in their decision to stay on their respective sides, it seemed.

The corners of his mouth tipped upwards in wry amusement and Leia sensed this was a recurring argument. Ben raised her hand, so dainty looking in his leather-clad hold, to smooth his lips over the bony ridges of her knuckles.

“I have to go,” he murmured to her skin, then placing her palm over her growing belly with care. “I have been gone for too long as it is.”

Leia wasn’t able to glance away in time to avoid seeing how Ben dipped his face to kiss her once more with vigor, teeth nipping and tongue plundering. Rey whimpered as he pulled away just as quickly, craning her neck to follow him.

“Please tell me you will be safe,” she whispered.

Ben avoided her gaze.

“Promise me you’ll take better care of yourself,” he mumbled back.

Ben fitted his mask back over his head and once more he was a man Leia couldn’t quite separate from the boy she gave birth to; now becoming the stranger she had raised. He pivoted from the bed, his back straight in a rigid position as he took long strides. When his unyielding grip closed around her bicep, Leia didn’t struggle against where he led.

Ben paused outside the infirmary. The void of his mask gaped down at her with an eerie calm that reminded her of the black of deep space, the sort that drove even the most experienced pilots mad.

“Protect her,” he uttered. _As if your life depends on it_ went unsaid but was strongly felt.

Leia had regrets, but she suspected her greatest would always be that her own son saw it necessary to threaten her to protect the young woman already in her charge and moreover carrying her grandchild. Regardless of how she felt about Rey’s questionable association with Ben, she wasn’t going to turn her away.

She sighed, closing eyes against her other great regret, the last words she had spoken to Han.

_If you see our son, bring him home._

Ultimately, her inaction, then subsequent action, had guided her to where she stood now.

“You should protect her yourself.”

_Stay here with me, become my sweet Ben once more._

Ben released his hold on her arm and together they glanced back into the infirmary. Rey’s gaze was fixed on him without any sign of faltering.

“Protect her,” he repeated, voice lowering with a tenderness that sounded wrong through his voice apparatus.

Suddenly, it occurred to her just what he was asking Leia to keep safe--his light. It still called to him.

He stalked off to be consumed by the dark of the passageway, his black robes blurring from view, but a traitorous flare of hope rose in her chest in a way she hadn’t been able to experience since the joyous, heart-wrenching moment she had felt Han and Ben reunite.

One day, she sensed, her son would find balance.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! All feedback is greatly appreciated, as always. :)


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